The FASEB Summer Conference II will be held on the Ciocco Resort in Lucca Italy, September 4 - 9, 2011. This is the second conference that rotates between the US and Europe. The first conference was held in 2009. This initial conference spurred considerable interdisciplinary cross-talk and spawned new collaborative studies between scientists working in areas that have been historically studied separately. There aren't any other conferences that focus on the NAD metabolome as a whole. The major areas of NAD metabolism and signaling research will be represented. The following nine sessions will be covered: NAD Biosynthesis and Metabolism (2 sessions), NAD metabolites and signaling, NAD dependent protein deacetylation by sirtuins, Poly-ADP-ribose metabolism, NAD crosstalk and biology, Mono-ADP ribosylation, Mechanisms of NAD-dependent gene regulation and Translational studies of NAD metabolism.
Broader Impacts The 2011 FASEB Summer conference on NAD Metabolism and Signalling will bring together a highly diverse group of scientists working in all areas of NAD-related metabolism and biology and provide a forum for exchange of information and data. The topics and themes that will be covered in this meeting will be global in nature, allowing for a unique interdisciplinary scientific experience that is not provided by other more specialized meetings that focus on only one aspect of NAD metabolism. Also, the conference will foster new interactions between scientists that do not normally meet one another in the course of their work.
The 2011 meeting "NAD Metabolism and Signaling" was held at Il Ciocco Resort, in Lucca Italy, from Sept 4-9, 2011. This meeting was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (Award 1130276), by the National Institute of Health and by the Federation of American Scientists Experimental Biology (FASEB). This meeting is held every two years and rotates between being hosted in the United States and Europe. The 2011 meeting brought together a highly diverse group of international scientists working in all areas of NAD-related metabolism and biology, allowing them to exchange the latest data from their labs with one another. The focus of the meeting was on NAD, a critically important metabolite, which is required by all living cells to produce energy. NAD, which is formed from the vitamin B3, also plays an important role in anti-oxidant pathways and helps to prevent the build up of dangerous toxins in cells within the body. In addition to these critical roles, NAD is used by cells to activate genes that prevent aging. Not surprisingly, given the biologic activities associated with NAD, the meeting covered a diverse range of topics including the role of NAD and vitamin B3 in cancer and aging and the use of NAD biosynthesis inhibitors to treat bacterial infections. One major goal of the meeting was to promote new groundbreaking research by facilitating the free exchange of ideas in the face-to-face setting of the meeting. A second goal of the meeting was to facilitate interactions between scientists working in different research areas. Most scientific meetings are focused very narrowly on a specific topic or subspecialty area. This meeting brought together scientists who work with different organisms (plants, bacteria, yeast, humans and mice) and work on different scientific questions (aging, cancer, infectious disease, immunology and genetics) and provided a forum for these scientists to learn about research being conducted in areas that they do not normally study. Importantly, the topics covered in this meeting are highly relevant to all aspects of fundamental basic biology and thus are applicable across a wide scientific spectrum. A third goal of the meeting was to provide a unique training opportunity for the junior scientists and under-represented women in science who attended the meeting. We offered all investigators who submitted an abstract the opportunity to give a short talk. The short talks were 15 minutes long with 10-12 minutes for the presentation and 3-5 minutes for questions. In total, 34 scientists gave short talks and, within this group, there were 14 women and 26 young investigators (mixture of graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and early-stage independent investigators). Thus, over half of the presentations at the meeting were selected from the submitted abstracts and young investigators gave 40% of all talks at the meeting. In addition to providing opportunities for the trainees to present their work at the meeting, we provided $500 travel scholarships for 11 junior scientists/women from the United States to attend the meeting. All of the funds provided by the NSF for this project/meeting were used for the training scholarships or to defray registration fees for the invited senior women conference speakers. The major outcomes of this NSF-sponsored project (meeting) were the following: (1) New basic, applied and translational research projects relevant to NAD biology and human health were initiated at the meeting through interactions between scientists working in research areas that have been historically studied independently from one another. (2) Fifteen young US investigators and women in science were provided with travel scholarships, enabling them so to attend a scientific meeting that featured 27 talks from leaders in their fields of research. (3) 34 young investigators and women in science were able to present their work, not only to their peers, but also to the leaders in their field of research. (4) 100+ scientists were given the opportunity to learn the latest unpublished information in their research field, enabling them to incorporate these data into their own research program and accelerate the pace of their research.
